We decided there was. Indisputable.The difference between THINKINGand FEELING: do not collapse,conflate or confuse, or you’rescrewed. Doubly.

And it’s the same with the Buddhaon the road. If you meet him, killhim.A Zen koan aimed at sayingwhat Emerson was saying thoughnot as politically correct.

Genius is the enemy of genius

so maybe we can factor thatin and be friendly about it,love our enemies.

Finished Product Standards… Consumer mode

clarity, coherence, consistency,chills up my spine, the play ofindifference & whelming attachment,symbolic & diabolic relationships,dead birds and jelly jars & all thatsymbolism and significance that wemay or may not be touched bywhen we read Nabokov.. ,

… they do not apply to

Composer Mode (in process mess & guess

what’s going on in-game,in-performance, in the middleof composing, writing, Wimbleton,downhill powder skiing when youare LOST in a cloud of be-here-now-unknowing responding to what comesto mind and not even THINKING inthat manipulative, control-it, safety-conscious oh-be-careful-&-correctway we walk-on-eggs as experts,commentators, self-help gurus,teachers....

And so Raymond Carver’s wordsare my enemy, detrimental to mygame. I’ve got to kill him for myown good & proceed to Thebes,answer the Sphinx, marry my momfor awhile and then put my eyes out.

Got to walk that lonely valley,got to walk it on my own.Mytho-logical..

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I choose, as a determining POINT in my life, to acknowledge a bullet fired into the armpit of my grandfather, Samuel Scoville, Jr. by athief in the night sometime in the late 19thc.

The thief escaped, my grandfather having pulled his own pistol from beneath the pillow,squeezing off a couple of rounds and sendingthe burglar scurrying into the Connecticut night...

For reasons offamily notoriety, the incident was reported in both New York and Philadelphia papers. A former roommate in Philly called up Young Goodman Sam, inviting him down for a weekend gala: The Yale-Penn Football game. “You can take my sister Katherine, and chaperone me and my fiancé, he said.

In those days couples were not advised to be alone. Unaccompanied.

Sam took a steam-driven locomotive train down toPhiladelphia, escorted Katherine to the leather-helmet contest, fell in love, asked her to marry him.She did & they lived more or less HAP-ily ever after, generating a tribe of offspring who like wise generated in kind so that if it hadn’t of been for that bullet, well, it’s impossible to begin to consider how unimaginably different life-as-we-know-itwould have been. No one can say.

For one thing: YOU, dear Reader, wouldn’t be reading THIS HERE right now, resurrecting these words to walk around in your skull-haus this very be-here-now moment. So even you are impacted forever by that bullet.

(I could drive up to Connecticut right now, retrieve the small bite of lead, drop it in your hand and remind you how co-incidental our life is—how inexplicable, how arbitrary & selective our accounts, how much we omit which is also absolutely necessary, how inadequate our because & affects.)

The bullet is a NECESSARY butINSUFFICIENT cause of who-I-am, without which any explanation would be incomplete. Sam Scoville